For a gang of old college buddies, the quaint resort town of South Cove, California, is the perfect spot for a no-holds-barred bachelor party. But for Jill Gardner—owner of Coffee, Books and More—this stag party is going to be murder . . .

After a few months of living with her boyfriend Greg, Jill is still getting used to sharing such close quarters, but she’s got no hesitation about joining him for a weekend at South Cove’s most luxurious resort. While Greg and his college pals celebrate their buddy’s upcoming wedding, Jill intends to pamper herself in style. But when the groom is found floating facedown in the pool, Jill must find the killer fast, or she might not have a boyfriend to come home to any more...

GUEST POST

Scheduling time for your dream

Today, I want to talk about living the dream. Sometimes people think the road to being published is easy.

Write a book, find a publisher, watch it sell on Amazon. But there’s so much more than that when you’re a working writer.

First on the list is writing a good book. And if anyone out there is a struggling author, you know that writing a good book doesn’t happen overnight. Although I have heard authors who can do it in a little over a week. But they’re the outliers here. We want to talk about a more normal process.

I can’t count the number of people who have told me that they want to write a book. I always steer them toward a writer’s group. Misery loves company. And a writer’s group will hold you accountable to meeting your writing goals. It doesn’t matter what your goals are, it can be a page a day, but you have to set a goal. And find an accountability partner.

What’s an accountability partner? That’s the person that is going to ask, every day if you wrote your one page (insert your goal here). They are also the people who are going to ask you if you are really serious if you fail to meet your goal day after day. When I started writing, I had four different groups I reported to on goal achievements. This year, I cut it down to just one. My friend and accountability partner. Why? Because I was spending way too much time talking about my goals, and not enough time actually working toward meeting them.

Someone said becoming a writer is like assigning yourself homework. Every Night. And it’s true. If you want to be an author, you have to finish a book. Then another one. Then do the edits and re-writing. Then edit again. And again. (And typos still sneak into the published version somehow.) Then you do your release activities, like designing and sending postcards to fans, posting the news on Facebook and Twitter and updating your website. And of course, there’s writing blogs. Like this one.

It’s a lot of work, but I love the career I’m building. And no one said life wasn’t going to be work. Especially building a life you love.

So what’s your dream? And do you have a plan to do something today to get yourself closer to your mountain? (Mountain = Achieving Dream.) Another prompt I love (and is on my white board) is to do something important before 11am. I love reaching out for dreams and I believe, no scratch that, I know I’m happier as I’m reaching for that brass ring.

Feel free to post about your dream. I’d love to hear what you’re working on.

New York Times and USA Today best-selling author Lynn Cahoon is an Idaho expat. She grew up living the small town life she now loves to write about. Currently, she’s living with her husband and two fur babies in a small historic town on the banks of the Mississippi river where her imagination tends to wander. Guidebook to Murder, Book 1 of the Tourist Trap series, won the 2015 Reader’s Crown award for Mystery Fiction.